Are You Focused on Value?
When you lead with value, customers follow because that’s what they want and need most of all. When you speak of the results they can achieve, they’re listening!
“Thank you for speaking with us yesterday about your need for increased IT security…”
Is that similar to how you start your sales messages? Or perhaps it’s a new prospective customer and you lead in with something like, “Hello. I’m Joe Salesguy from Sales Incorporated with 20 locations nationwide and I’m writing to you today to talk about your need for increased IT security.”
You’ve Just Wasted Your Only Opportunity
Commercial and corporate copywriters refer to the first sentence of every email, letter, or other message as “the hook.” It is the only chance you have to get the reader to continue reading. If you don’t capture their attention there, they’ll probably click “delete” and move on.
If you’re thinking that means the first sentence needs to announce how wonderful your product or service is, you need to think more deeply about it and ask yourself, “What is the customer really looking for?” If you can answer that question in the first sentence such that it leaves the reader wanting to know more, you’ve got it.
The answer has nothing to do with speeds and feeds, years in business, your reputation for great customer service, features of your product or service, or anything else having to do with you.
Yes, it’s not about you.
What Customers Want Most
Every customer comes to every sales message wanting to find available value. What value? The value your product or service brings to them when they invest in it. Any sale is always an investment, because the customer absolutely expects a return, usually in the form of an increase in their profitability. And the only two ways to increase profitability are to increase revenue and/or to decrease costs.
You may now be wondering if I’m confused. Just a moment ago I said it’s not about you. Now I’m saying it’s about the value you bring. Which is it?
It stops being confusing when you phrase your value statements in the context of the customer.
The Context of the Customer
Try this simple experiment. Visit your own website and count how many paragraphs begin with “we”, “our”, “my”, “I”, or your company’s name. If yours is like most websites it will be upward of 90%.
Why should the customer believe your claims about yourself? They don’t know you. They don’t know how honest and forthright you are. They have no reason to believe, and no reason to care.
Compare these two versions of a potential pitch paragraph:
Our new firewall offers increased throughput and advanced inspection capabilities. This increases protection while preventing latency.
Now let’s just flip that upside down!
You need to increase protection to safeguard your data and avoid expensive breaches, but you don’t want users to experience access delays. Our new firewall, with increased throughput and advanced capabilities, offers you both!
You can feel the difference. The second version makes you feel more enthusiastic about learning more about the products. Why? Because you led with the customer’s concerns. You showed them that you care about them first, and what they need. You framed it completely in the context of the customer.
Customers Seek Value
Bigger, better, faster, less expensive are all great qualities, but useless to customers if they don’t produce the results they need. Those needs are always defined by the value they ultimately deliver to the business. How much faster can processes be completed? How many more customers can be served per day? How much time will people save getting their jobs done? How will this promote your brand?
Each customer defines the value they’re seeking differently. To get their attention and keep it long enough to deliver your entire sales message, you must begin by getting them thinking you’re most concerned about them and the value they, in particular, are seeking. When they feel comfortable that your primary concern is their receiving that value, you’ve got their interest and they will indeed read your entire message… and reply to it by moving forward on your call-to-action (CTA).
Flip It All Upside Down
Armed with this understanding of the importance of presenting available value in the context of the customer, go back to your website and start flipping those paragraphs upside down. If they begin in the context of you, flip them around to start with the value available to the customer stated in the context of the customer.
When you go back to read your revised paragraphs, you will see the difference, but that won’t be what’s important. What’s important is that you’ll feel the difference, and so will your prospects and customers.